Competitor analysis or Competitive analysis can sometimes sound intimidating and vague, but this business jargon, deserves more than just attention, i.e., implementation. In order to make informed decisions about your brand, it is essential to know what the other monarchs of the industry are devising, digitally. This starts from simple steps like, researching, tracking and ultimately leads to gathering rightful information. The analog comparison of performances and results of their marketing initiatives, will educate you in how to improvise on your current digital schemes.
Here are few options that can teach you how to monitor your competitors and stay ahead of them in the game; keep reading!
Identify: Identifying your competitors sensibly becomes the first step. Since it’s fairly obvious, you are required to go beyond your direct and biggest competitors. Along with this, an eye on the new entrants is also advised.
Follow their footsteps and Track their PR presence: Knowledge is power, and knowing the PR and marketing steps of your rivals, will give you an opportunity to capture their lost and revised market. Here’s what you can do:
Social Media Presence: Tracking Social Media Presence of your competitors is like having your competitors perform market testing, for your brand. While monitoring the social media conduct of rival companies, you will get the benefit of having a pre-created market campaign with the same kind of metrics as them. To get better results, you can modify it as per your brand customs.
Marketing Campaigns: A major priority; marketing campaigns or real-time competitor analysis will give you the benefit of knowledge.
Identifying the influencers in the game: Influencer marketing focuses on influencers rather than targets involved as a whole, which helps brands identify the potential customers. Your competitors orients marketing activities around the influencers involved in the race; knowing the same will help you recognize the level of influencer marketing relevant for your brand.
Receive live product feedbacks: The best way to out-win your competitor is to give your customer the product/service, your competitor has less potential to. How do you do that? There are tools available online that many companies are using to track their competitors progress. For example; Mention is a famous tool adopted by companies like Leetchi for competitor analysis.
“It’s also very important to monitor what’s said on Leetchi to upgrade our product and user experience.” says one of the marketing heads of the company.
Other tools, companies generally use to monitor their rivals for customer feedback are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is a tool of immediacy and Facebook is more of a sophisticated automation tool which offers of-the-moment conversation further helping you realize the “true thoughts” of customers. Knowing what your target customers say for your rival brands will help you build a better relationship with your customers in the future.
Exploring new markets: Setting alerts on the potential markets of your targeted countries will enable you pull out valuable information that can proportionally direct you to set your targets. An example is shortlisting keywords according to your targeted countries.
Since none of the above mentioned bullets require any data crunching, or hardcore technical skills, with simple research and tactic steps, you can have answers delivered to you. Remember, Knowledge is power!